No, not everyone has to like sportts

From Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Not everyone has to like sports.

I recently read an article on Wikipedia about “childhood gender nonconformity” as a possible correlation with homosexuality, among other things. Childhood gender nonconformity is described as a phenomenon in which “pre-pubescent children do not conform to expected gender-related sociological or psychological patterns.”
I would assume that for boys, one of the greatest “expected gender-related sociological or psychological patterns” has to do with sports. Well, I am not gay, nor have I ever been gay. However, as a child, not only was I terrible in sports, I didn’t even like sports!
There were times when my father and brother (or once, my Hebrew school class) took me to Yankee Stadium, and I found myself bored after one or two innings. Sure, I tried to fake it, flipping baseball cards with the other kids and pretending to listen when they talked about baseball players, but I’m sure I didn’t fool anybody.
The fact my actual interests at that age – trains and cars – were also so-called “masculine” interests didn’t win me any friends. Neither did those physical activities I did do well in – for example, gymnastics. Eventually I won a bronze medal in gymnastics, but that didn’t impress anyone compared to someone who, for example, was able to pitch a winning game.
What I needed was to connect with other kids who were into trains and cars. The internet would have helped me in that, but the internet, at that time, was years away.
Now, I’m able to watch an entire baseball game, and I can even enjoy it. I can enjoy watching basketball, although for shorter periods of time, say, 15 minutes or so. As for football, it leaves me cold – the type of people who play football are presumably the same big, tough, aggressive guys who I had nothing in common with then, and probably have nothing in common with now.
But still, I cringe when fathers load their 6-year-old boys up with football jerseys, hockey sticks, baseball bats, whatever, and just expect that they’ll really be into sports.
Just once, I’d like to see just one of those kids say, when their father asks them to go to a game, say, “No thanks, Dad, I’d rather play with my model trains, and look at my picture book of classic cars!”

Don't become a Solarian

By Raanan Geberer
Originally published in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 2012

Back in the 1980s, I used to write back-cover and inside-front-cover blurbs for science fiction and fantasy books. And of course, I had to read the books, or at least the first half of them, so that I would know what I was writing about.
One of the books I had to write these notes for was Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation and Earth.” It concerned a race of people known as the Solarians, who came from Earth to settle the planet Solaria. Over the centuries, the Solarians became more and more isolated from each other.
By the time the explorers who were the heroes of the book landed on Solaria, the inhabitants lived on isolated estates, served by hundreds of robots, and had very little contact with each other. Indeed, they developed a powerful aversion to being in the same room with another human, and met each other only for very special purposes.
They did everything — trade with each other, carry on friendships, learn new subjects — by holographic projections (the Internet barely existed, except for a handful of hobbyists, when the book was published).
There was one problem: the birth rate kept declining, for obvious reasons. Eventually, the rulers of Solaria solved that problem by eliminating natural reproduction altogether and reproducing by human cloning.
We haven’t gotten to that point yet, but much of the book has come true. We trade with each other over the Internet, take courses over the Internet, communicate with friends over the Internet, and increasingly get our entertainment from the Internet.
Not so long ago, the local bookstore, the local record store, the local video store were not only places to buy books, CDs and so forth — they were places to hang out, meet friends, discuss new releases. Now, the human element has been cut out.
As far as work is concerned, some people already work completely in front of their terminals, and have no contact with their “co-workers” or supervisors except in cyberspace. More such “workplaces” are sure to follow.
There’s nothing wrong with the Internet. It's made communication between people in different parts of the country much easier. It's made it possible to subscribe to magazines without filling out annoying forms and sealing envelopes, it’s made it easier for people with unusual interests who may feel isolated in their immediate surroundings to seek out others with the same interests.
You can send photos to friends with the click of a mouse without having to first wait for the drugstore to develop those photos, and you can find out about train delays without having to wait a half-hour on the phone.
But remember — the Internet was created to serve people, not the other around.
It originally had a very specific purpose — to link educational institutions so that research and information could be exchanged quickly. It was never supposed to do everything. If people rely too much on the Internet, what happens in the event of a catastrophe, when it goes down. Can people even survive without it?
There’s nothing wrong with keeping your friends’ and relatives’ contact information on the Internet, but if that’s the only place it exists, with no paper backup, you may be asking for trouble. When the Internet first came along, people did preserve backups — for example, they kept their typewriters in a closet — but as time went on, they ceased to feel the need for them.
Also in back the 1980s, I remember a news story about a man who resolved not to leave his house for a year. He was successful in some ways — he ordered food in, bought clothes by phone — but eventually had to go outside to go to the post office and buy stamps, go to the IRS office to pay taxes, and more.
The Internet has made a Solarian-type existence much more feasible. Someone who doesn’t want to leave his house for a year can easily do so, with the only trips necessary being those to take the garbage out or to go to the mailbox.
The Internet has been a great boon to mankind. But once in awhile, turn your smartphone and your computer off. Take long walks in the woods. Read a book. Listen to music. Go to the beach. Get together with someone you haven’t seen in awhile. Go to a museum. Go to an amusement park. Go to a store and browse around.
Above all — don’t become a Solarian!

Twinkies: After the supply ends?

By Raanan Geberer

Originally in Brooklyn Daily Eagle

One day, at work, I was busy typing away, when one of my co-workers whispered in my ear, “At lunch, you might to see someone on the fifth floor of your building. He has the real s----. I told him about you.”
I couldn’t wait that long. I had to have it NOW! I excused myself, went upstairs and knocked on the door, sweating and breathing heavily.
“Are you Ron?” asked a shady little man in a big hat and a long coat.
“Yes.”
‘Come in,” he said. “We’ve got to be really careful. The cops were here yesterday. We got the stuff you need.”
“Is it the REAL stuff? From Canada, or Mexico?”
“No,” he said, “Our shipments got messed up. But my man down in Florida made it, according to the original recipe. He used to be a meth dealer, but now he finds doing this more profitable.”
The man ushered me into his backroom. There, on the table, were about 100 of the golden-colored cakes, stacked on top of each other. Several nondescript middle-aged women, most of whom appeared to be immigrants, were packing them into glassine envelopes.
I paid the man $100, and ate two or three of them as fast as I could. The man looked at me with amusement. He knew he had me. But this wasn’t enough—there was something else I needed.
“Thanks for the Twinkies,” I said, “but I can’t take that much of a rush. I need some Snowballs to bring me down. Do you have any?”
Without a word, he ushered me into another room. I began to grab a Snowball, when he grabbed my arm.
“Just one, m-------r!” he said, pulling out a knife. “We’re running out of them. These are expensive, you know!”
I gave him another hundred dollars. Biting into the Snowball’s marshmallow exterior, I felt a supreme joy—a joy the average person will never know.
I read yesterday that another company is buying the rights to Twinkies, Snowballs, and Hostess orange-colored cupcakes. Soon, I’ll be just another American. But until then, I’ll be an addict, a creature of night, another slave to the sugary goo that has ruined so many people’s lives.

November 19, 2012 - 3:39pm

When the Therapist Lost Her Mind

By Raanan Geberer
Originally published in "Mr. Beller's Neighborhood"

My wife Sarah and I had been seeing our therapist, Brenda, for years - both separately and as a couple. When I met Sarah, she was already seeing Brenda, who was then in training to be a psychiatric social worker after a long career as a high school social worker and Spanish teacher.
After we started having some problems, my wife insisted that we go to see her for couples counseling. Brenda had never been trained in couples counseling, and what she did couldn’t be called by that term– for example, she didn’t give us assignments. But we both found the sessions helpful. Later, I began seeing her on my own, as well.
Brenda was in her sixties, tall and slightly overweight. Her office, part of a suite that she shared with several other health-related professionals, was full of reproductions of paintings on the wall, psychology books, photos from her many travels to Europe, and copies of magazines like the New Yorker and the Atlantic. It was obvious that she was a “high culture” fanatic.
Sarah loved talking to Brenda after and before sessions, but there was one sticking point – Sarah had a strong orientation toward spirituality and religion, and when Sarah brought up her belief in God during therapy sessions, Brenda tried to dismiss it as being immature. It just wasn’t part of her world – she couldn’t understand it.
Sarah aside, Brenda helped me quite a bit by making me see certain people whom I had obsessively thought about in a new light. For example, there was one guy I knew in my 20s whom, at the time, I had thought to be terribly exciting. He had been a chronic shoplifter, a constant adulterer, an enthusiastic drug user, and didn’t care who knew it. When I bumped into him again, he told me that he had become a born-again Christian and was studying to be an actuary. I lamented the fact to Brenda.
“Don’t you realize that you were so frustrated that you were living vicariously through him?” she answered. “You saw his life as more exciting than yours. But you don’t need him now.” Brenda also was supportive of me and Sarah as a couple, and always encouraged us to eat out after our joint sessions.
It was only after seeing Brenda for about five years that we discovered, quite by accident, that Brenda lived in Stuyvesant Town, just like we did. Indeed, when we joined a nearby community garden, we found out that Brenda was a member of the garden too. When I saw her there I merely said hello and that was that – Brenda insisted that socializing with clients would be unprofessional.
One day, she didn’t show up for a therapy session without any warning. She apologized and told me to come next week. During the next few months, she missed two or three more appointments. One day, when I showed up at the usual time, 6 p.m., Brenda, who had apparently been sleeping on the couch, awoke with a start.
"Oh, Rob. It’s you! I can’t believe you’re here at this time!"
"What?"
"Don’t you know it’s 6 in the morning? Look outside! It was still dark until a few minutes ago! I must have slept here all night!"
It took me about ten minutes of arguing to convince her that it wasn’t 6 in the morning, and then we had our session as usual. But the experience left me quite unnerved.
After one or two more missed appointments, my wife convinced Brenda that she should see us in her apartment, since she lived so close to us. This, Sarah reasoned, would cut down on the problem. But it just created new problems.
Once, after I entered Brenda’s apartment, which was dominated by a grand piano and piles of sheet music, she greeted me with, "Oh, Rob! So nice of you to have a visit! I didn’t expect you! I’ll get you some cheese, and some fruit—look, we can order some sushi from the store! Is Sarah coming, too?" I had to explain to her that this wasn’t a social visit, but a therapy session.
Within a month or so, Brenda became so disorganized – or so we thought – that she canceled every appointment either of us tried to make. When Sarah confronted her, Brenda merely said, “Something’s going on here, but after it’s over, we can make more appointments.”

Both of us started looking for a new therapist. But just to make sure, Sarah called Brenda again. “Oh, I, I can’t talk now,” Brenda replied, her voice ascending higher than usual. “My relatives are coming! My relatives are coming! I’m so worried!” You could hear her breathing heavily.
We found a new therapist, but a few months later decided to call Brenda just to see what was going on. Her phone number was disconnected. I walked over to her building and found that her name had been removed from the lobby.
That summer, I was planting some tomatoes in the community garden when I saw Dominick, the overweight, good-natured accountant who had been head of the garden committee forever.
“Do you know Brenda Cantor?” I asked. He answered in the affirmative.
“What happened to her?”
“She lost her mind!” he exclaimed as he stooped over to pull out a weed.
“Did she have Alzheimer’s?” That’s what Sarah and I had suspected.
“Oh, she definitely had Alzheimer’s,” Dominick answered. “Her relatives came, took her away to somewhere near Philly, then closed out the apartment. It’s all gone!”
“Do you know anything else?” I added, picking one of the cherries from the cherry tree.
“Naah,” he said, waving his hand. “I just know that she lost her marbles. I realized something was wrong when she started to call me every other day , saying, `I lost my garden key!’ It’s sad—very sad.”
He probably didn’t even know Brenda was a therapist, I reflected. When I got home, I told Sarah what he’d said. She was sad and even cried a little, but at least now we knew what happened to her.
Still, once in awhile, when we find ourselves in the old neighborhood where Brenda used to have her office, we peep into the hallway.
There, you can still see the name over the bell:
“Brenda Cantor, CSW, therapist.”

When 'the projects’ were a great place to live

By Raanan Geberer
Originally in Brooklyn Daily Eagle

For the past week, the New York City Housing Authority has been under constant attack for, among other things, leaving $1 billion in federal money unspent while tenants in the city’s housing projects often have to wait a year to get simple repairs.
The scandal comes on top of the public’s basic perception that housing projects are basically drug-ridden, crime-ridden, gang-ridden developments where most of the tenants are single mothers on welfare. While this is a gross exaggeration, as a one-time assistant manager of the giant Edenwald Houses in the northeast Bronx, I can testify that there’s a grain of truth to this stereotype.
But earlier, between the ages of five and 19, mainly during the 1960s and early 1970s, I grew up in a city housing project — Marble Hill Houses in the northwest Bronx. And at that time, the projects were seen as desirable places to live.
The projects were not all low-income: they were divided into low-income projects and middle-income projects, such as Marble Hill. There were quite a few projects in Brooklyn that were similar to Marble Hill in Brooklyn, such as Sheepshead-Nostrand Houses, Marlboro Houses, Bayview Houses and Wyckoff Gardens.
The great majority of the people in Marble Hill were working people, and many of the fathers, like mine, were veterans. They came from all of the major ethnic groups in New York in those days — Irish, Italian, Jewish, black and Puerto Rican and I can’t think of one incident of ethnic bias. The parents may have made prejudiced remarks — my father did — but these remarks remained behind closed doors. As for the kids, they were more interested in heading to the playground to play basketball or handball, or to go on the monkey bars or the slide.
Until I was 16 or so and the project began to change, I don’t remember any robberies or burglaries. And while some of the wilder teenagers may have used drugs, they used “goof balls” and “pep pills,” not heroin and cocaine. The housing cops were always around, curtailing any uncomfortable situations.
What many people don’t understand was that in those days, you had to prove that you were a “respectable” person to get into the project. You had to prove that you paid your gas bill, your electric bill, rent on your previous apartment. If you said you were married, you had to show a marriage certificate.
In my elementary school, about half the kids were from the project and the other half were from the nearby small apartment houses and private houses. I can’t remember one occasion where one of these kids said anything disparaging about people who lived in the projects. We all basically had the same amount of money.
Also in our neighborhood were the “Catholic kids” who went to St. John’s School. I can only remember one incident in all those years where any of them made fun of the many Jewish kids who lived in the project. And that one time, the nuns from the school came out, yelled at the perpetrators and made sure that they never did anything like that again!
What happened? For one thing, beginning in the 1960s, the state began to build Mitchell-Lama apartment houses to attract the same kind of lower-middle-class people who lived in many of the projects. These buildings tended to be more modern, with terraces and air conditioners in the apartments.

• The projects’ “XD” procedure, in which people who earned over the income limit were told to leave, robbed the projects of many of their natural leaders and model citiens. My own father was told to leave after he passed the CPA test and got a new job. As one of my co-workers at Edenwald said years later, “We knew the XD procedure was ruining the projects, but there was nothing we could do about it.”
• The 1960s and early 1970s were a period of great economic opportunity, and many people were able to move out of the projects into co-op apartments or private houses.
• Above all, the projects’ strict entrance requirements were changed around the same time. Some people said this was because of pressure from politicians. Others said that there were so many “emergency cases,” people who were burned out of their apartments due to constant fires in areas like Bushwick and the South Bronx, that the Housing Authority had to let them in as soon as possible. Many of the new people seemed, at least to me, to be rather unfriendly, and soon you began to see graffiti in the lobby and to smell urine in the elevators. For the first time, the established residents felt the need to establish a tenant patrol with a desk in the lobby.

By the time I was of college age, one of the reasons I decided to go to one of the SUNYs rather than to Lehman or CCNY, like many of my friends did, was to get away from the projects. Within a year, my parents had moved out, too. It’s very unlikely that the city’s housing projects will ever be the way they were in the 1950s and ‘60s. Still, my intent in writing this piece is to capture a moment in time, a moment that so many people nowadays don’t even know existed.

A Bronx Yom Kippur, 1970

       
By Raanan Geberer                                                                                        
Four people were walking up the steep Kingsbridge Road hill on the way to the Young Israel of Kingsbridge for Yom Kippur. They were Sid Steinberg, an accountant in his late 40s; his two sons, Rob, 17, and Joel, 15; and Sid’s uncle Lazar, an elderly widower who lived a few blocks from the Steinbergs. Lazar was a retired grocer; but he was also a Yiddish poet and short-story writer who was often published in the Forward and the Workmen’s Circle’s magazine. They weren’t taking the bus because traditionally, one doesn’t travel on this, the holiest day of the year.

The one person who wasn’t with them was Mom, who had such bad asthma that sometimes she could hardly walk across the street to the store. But even if she’d been well, Mom basically had no use for religion. The rebellious daughter of former communists, Mom was proud of the fact that she’d rejected her parents’ pro-Soviet orientation while she was still in her teens; still, their strident atheism stayed with her. When Rob tried to talk to her about his growing interests in karma, reincarnation, Eastern religions and Kabbalism, Mom shot back with, “Maybe we should have sent you to that child psychologist for a few more years! Then you wouldn’t be talking about religion so much!” She’d conceded to Dad on sending the kids to Hebrew school, but she criticized the rabbi at every opportunity.

Near the end of the hill, where Kingsbridge Road transformed into a level plane, Lazar started to talk to Rob and Joel in the heavily accented, deep bass voice that made him a favorite in Yiddish choruses. “You know, kinderlach,” he said, “the Talmud says there are four kinds of students. One is like a sponge, he absorbs all he studies. One is like a sieve, he saves what is good in the study and leaves out what is not. One is like a funnel, that lets the liquid in one end and out the other. And the fourth is like a strainer that lets the good wine out but absorbs the dregs...” Lazar had been a yeshiva student in his native Lithuania and even though he was no longer observant, he still liked to show off his Talmudic learning.

Rob wondered why Dad would go to such an Orthodox shul as Young Israel. Dad was only half-kosher, didn’t observe Shabbos, never mentioned God or faith. It could only be, Rob reasoned, that Dad was so set in his ways that this was the type of shul he remembered from his childhood in the immigrant East Bronx; and on those few occasions when he did go to shul, he wanted to go to the kind of place he felt comfortable with. If Dad had a religion, it was loyalty to the Jewish people, especially Israel. Dad had been one of a small number of American volunteers in Israel’s ’48 War of Independence and had lived in Jerusalem with Mom for two years after their marriage. While he didn’t talk much about those days, his commitment was evidenced in the many photos and paintings of Jerusalem in the apartment.

Finally, the shul. They sat down, put on their tallises and took out their prayer books. Despite the name, Young Israel of Kingsbridge was what, years later, Rob’s wife would call an “old men’s shul”; varicose veins, stooped backs, croaking voices ruled. Rob idly looked into the women’s section see whether there were any teenage girls his age, but he already knew he’d be disappointed; the two or three that were there were yeshiva types with long sleeves, long dresses, too much makeup. A relationship with one of them was out of the question.

Joel, in the next seat, started kicking Rob playfully. They kicked each other under the seat, giggling with muffled voices, until their father caught on and said, “Will you guys cut it out!” They soon arrived at the Shema, the most important prayer in the Jewish religion, and Dad grabbed Rob’s hand and made him point to each line, word by word, apparently not knowing or caring that Rob knew enough Hebrew to follow it himself. When they got to Adon Olam, Dad called Rob’s attention to the fact that each line began with a successive letter of the alphabet. “It’s an acrostic,” Dad said proudly, pleased with his own knowledge. Rob was bored: Dad said the same thing every year.

Soon, it was time for the rabbi’s sermon, which served as break time for the Steinberg family. Dad encouraged Rob and Joel to go outside; he knew they needed an outlet for their pent-up energy. They walked the few blocks to the Eames Place shul, which was bigger, more modern, and had more families as members. As always, a crowd of kids gathered in front. Joel recognized Alan Greenstein, a tall kid in his class who was a big deal on the basketball team. Joel and Alan spent the next 10 minutes talking about the Knicks; Rob, who really wasn’t that much into sports, just looked on.

When they got back to the shul, the congregation was chanting Anu Amecha, or “We Are Your People,” a seemingly endless prayer whose melody was only heard on Yom Kippur. Joel leaned over to Rob and sang, in a mock-Yiddish accent, “Anu whore-echa, ve’ato hu elohaynoo, anu pimp-echa, ve’ato hoo mosheaynoo!” Rob started cracking up, and laughed until Dad told him to be quiet. After that came Ashamnu, a prayer of penitence that were part of the solemn holiday service. The congregation chanted, in Hebrew, the sins that they might have been collectively guilty of: “We have killed, we have stolen, we have borne false witness, we have committed adultery, we have mocked, we have been disrespectfulÿ” Dad tapped Rob on the shoulder. “Sounds like you!” Dad whispered, with a laugh. Rob, hurt by Dad’s remarks, just sulked.

When the morning service ended, the Steinberg family, because of the long trip up and down the hill, traditionally went home to stay rather than return for the evening service that ended the holiday. They’d already heard the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, anyway. (There was a synagogue closer to them, on their side of the hill, but Mom and Dad both decreed that the family would never have anything to do with that place!)

Walking down Kingsbridge Road near the V.A. Hospital, Lazar asked Dad, “So, how are the boys doing in school?”

“Oh, very good,” Dad answered. “They get that from their mother—she was a Phi Beta Kappa, you know. Not like me, with my C’s and D’s at CCNY!” He laughed, embarrassed.

“By the way, Israel canceled the municipal elections in the West Bank,” Lazar commented.

“That’s because they all voted for the PLO! We try to be nice to them by letting them have their own elections, and what happens? They vote for terrorists!”

“Dad,” Rob objected, “you know I’m not anti-Israel. But you gotta admit, the Palestinians were screwedÿ.”

“Palestinians? Listen, in my day, we were the Palestinians! They were called Jordanians! Look, I was there, remember? You’re telling me about the Arabs?” Rob retreated into himself; you couldn’t argue with Dad. If you presented a better argument than him, he’d only ignore you, as if he’d never heard what you’d said.

As the family got to the beginning of the hill, Lazar said in a low voice to Dad, “Look, zey hoven a bodega dort’n!”

“A bodega? Oh, maybe we can eat some cuchifritos!” Dad laughed at the foreign-sounding word. “That’s a bad sign! You mark my words, everybody will move out in five years, and it’ll be 100 percent Black and Hispanic! Then they’ll start burning the place down! If one of them has a fight with his brother, he burns his house down! If he has a fight with his girlfriend, he burns her house downÿ”

Now it was Joel’s turn to challenge Dad. “So,” Joel argued, “are you telling me that Earl Gardner and his sister from our building, who are probably straight-A students, would burn their house down?”

“Well, um, of course, er, some are OK,” Dad fumbled, embarrassed. “But most of them are poor people, up from the South or Puerto Rico. Half of them can’t read or write!” Rob had complained to Mom about Dad several times, but despite Mom’s self-congratulatory liberalism, when it came to race, she was almost as bad as Dad. Like most adults in this lower-middle-class neighborhood, Mom and Dad let their fears overwhelm everything else.  Even Grandpa Harry, the former communist who was still a socialist, said, “Vell, I vish it vas a class war instead of a race war, but in ah race war, you have to support your own race!”

Satisfied with needling his father, Joel turned to Rob. He sang into Rob’s ear an off-color parody of the Irish Rovers’ recent pop song, “Unicorn,” substituting the word “eunuch” for that of the mythical one-horned beast:

“Some cats and rats and elephants,

But as sure as you’re born,

You’re not gonna see no eunuch (chopping sound).”

Rob laughed uncontrollably until Dad noticed and gave both boys a dirty look. When they were all halfway down the hill, Lazar again went into his Talmudic shtick: “Sidney, remember, in the Talmudic tractate Pirkei Avos, it says that a father should do three things for his son: Teach him a trade, teach him how to swim, and get a wife for him.”

Rob was slightly interested in what Lazar was saying, but only slightly. Maybe, Rob reasoned, back in the ‘30s and ‘40s, when Lazar and Dad’s long-deceased father, who’d been a lay cantor for his tiny East Bronx shul, presided over the family holiday celebrations, the observances had more meaning. But as it was now, Dad basically treated Yom Kippur like an oil change -- as an obligation.

When they got to the bottom of the hill, they bid Lazar goodbye, then went home. Dad went to sleep; Rob and Joel started reading their school assignments, since there wasn’t much else they could do. At about 3 p.m., Rob could fight his hunger pangs no longer. Surely, he said to himself, God wouldn’t mind if he had a drink of orange juice. He went to the refrigerator. Suddenly, he heard footsteps behind him. He froze with fear—Dad! But it was only Mom, wheezing and puffing her Primatene inhaler. She smiled.

“I won’t tell Dad,” she said, coughing. “How’s your good old uncle Lazar?”

“Oh, he’s OK!”

She smiled. “I’m glad. You know, Dr. Simon told me he’s going to start me on some new medication,” she said. “If it works, maybe I can start going to my French movies again.” Mom had been a high school French teacher before her health had forced her to retire; she loved everything French.  “Wanna go with me one of these days?”

“Um, I don’t know, Mom.” Going someplace with Mom was always a problem for Rob. One minute, she’d act sweet and nice; the next, she’d be telling him that he’d been considered a disturbed child when he was younger, that he still had “many problems,” and that he shouldn’t expect much out of life. And that was the last thing he wanted to hear.

“OK. Well, let me know. I’m gonna go back to the room: I got two magazines in the mail yesterday, the New Yorker and Commentary. You can read them when I’m through.” Giving herself an extra puff, she shuffled back in the direction of the parents’ bedroom.

About fifteen minutes later, Joel, less fearful of Dad than his brother, turned on WABC Top 40 Radio. Immediately, Dad yelled from the other room: “Turn off that junk! This is Yom Kippur, you know! Is something wrong with you?”

Suddenly, Dad’s and Mom’s voices were heard, arguing. After awhile, Mom addressed Rob and Joel, projecting her voice from the parents’ bedroom as best she was able: “Boys, we decided on a compromise. You can listen to the radio, but only to talk programs—no music!” Joel immediately turned to Lee Leonard’s sports call-in show on WNBC; for the rest of the afternoon, he was in heaven.

 At 6:30, 45 minutes before the end of Yom Kippur, Dad started cooking dinner. It was the same every year: rubbery chicken with bland, frozen carrots and peas. “I’m gonna give you the bird! Ha, ha, ha!” Dad joked. No one laughed—he used that line at least once a week. After it was served, the family ate in silence, a silence punctuated only by Dad slurping his tea. Dad soon turned on the all-news station, WINS, and opened up the Post, eating all the while. He later went to the refrigerator and started serving the cake, scattering crumbs all over the table.

 After Rob and Joel finished, they went to their room, without a goodbye, to watch the latest episode of Mod Squad. Mom walked slowly to the phone and dialed her old friend from Hunter College, Alice. The two of them spoke two or three times a day, yet rarely saw each other because of Mom’s illness.

 Seeing Mom at the phone, Dad said, with a hint of mockery, “Oh, you’re calling your buddy? OK, call your buddy! I’m gonna watch the ferdlach!” The ferdlach, or horses in Yiddish, was what Dad called cowboy shows and movies. “Yeah, the ferdlach! Ha, ha, ha!” Rob and Joel, hearing Dad’s voice from the other room, both wondered how often Dad could tell the same old joke--which wasn’t funny to begin with.

 And thus, the Steinberg family ended Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year.

Who knows what the Barclays center will bring?

Originally in Brooklyn Daily Eagle July 2012      

By Raanan Geberer
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
It is now only a matter of months before the Barclays Center opens, changing the face of Downtown Brooklyn forever.
We’re used to audiences pouring out of shows by modern dance companies or a symphony at BAM, but that's nothing compared to the huge crowds that will be coming to the huge 19,000-seat venue for Nets games or to see such blockbuster acts as Rush, Neil Young or The Who. And it will be even busier if the Islanders decide to relocate there.
What will the scene be outside the arena after the events? Will “Gridlock Sam” Schwartz’s transportation plan work? Will Barclays’ security plan work?
We don’t know. But we do have a clue.
We just have to look across the river, at Madison Square Garden. Not only do the two venues share sports team and major concerts, but both are a stone’s throw from a major Long Island Rail Road station.
Looking in the area around Madison Square Garden, we see that there is a residential community to the south (Chelsea), but the few blocks south of the Garden are completely dominated by businesses catering to Garden-goers (although not exclusively). There are sports bars, convenience stores, fast-food outlets, and even one or two “real” restaurants.
We also see, in the five or so blocks between the Garden and the residential area and in one or two blocks west of the Garden, garages that offer discounts to people going to games or concerts. Gridlock Sam’s transportation plan relies heavily on the use of garages that are near, but not on top of, Barclays Center. The garages on West 31st Street, West 30th Street and so on are real-life examples of the same thing, and they seem to work.
What about the crowds, which some neighborhood residents fear will do such damage? Of course, as in any public event, you do have some rowdy, drunk kids hitting the streets near Madison Square Garden.
But before and after every event, we almost always see groups of cops standing around — and when I see groups, I don’t mean two or three, but 10 or 12, with cop cars, EMS vehicles and vans nearby. These cops’ mere presence keeps mayhem to a minimum. Yes, we do see scalpers — and we’re likely to see them at Barclays, too. But we hardly ever see gang fights or violent robberies.
Of course, there are important differences between the areas around the two arenas. Madison Square Garden is not a stone’s throw from two giant shopping malls, as Barclays is from Atlantic Center and Atlantic Terminal. The presence of the malls must be taken into account in any security plan. But bear in mind that most, if not all, of the stores in these malls will be closed by the end of games and concerts anyway.
No, we still don’t know if the traffic, transit and security plans for Barclays Arena will work. But the example of Madison Square Garden shows that something like these CAN work.
Raanan Geberer is managing editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle